Sold to the Lady in the Wedding Dress! Peacock Wedding Guest Album

I have been working hard on a great project, for an Etsy customer.  A lady called Sylvia contacted me, to ask if I could make a special Wedding Guest Album for her.  Her theme was Peacocks  (in a traditional style, rather than too blingy), with a colour scheme of dark blue, browns and touches of gold/copper colours. 

I sent her a picture of some Peacock paper that I had:

This was a reproduction of a Chinese wallpaper from a National Trust property in the UK. 

Sylvia loved this paper and we came up with a design for her book, using her ideas and mine combined.  She wants her guests to write their messages on some blue luggage-tag style tags that she is making.  She thought it would be lovely to have an album where she could store these after the wedding. 

I sent her a little "Samples Book", to show what she could select from for the pages, covering materials, interleaves, stitching and thread, eyelets on the covers etc.  There were samples of paper and card for pages, covering materials and silk pieces in various "peacock" colours. 

 

After some discussion, we settled on a design with large, stiff card pages, to which she will attach brown kraft paper envelopes, to hold the tags. She wanted an oriental stab-stitch binding, so I included this on the sample book, to show what it would be like, along with a sample of silk bookcloth, that she could have as an edging for the covers. 

She liked the golden linen binding thread and navy silk edging so much, that she decided to have these for the "real" book.  We agreed that the back cover would be brown kraft paper (as she liked the back cover of my sample book - which I only did because I didn't have enough spare cover paper!)  She chose interleaves of a strong, but fine Japanese mulberry tissue and we agreed that there should be an interleaf between the last page and the back cover, as the kraft paper was not guaranteed acid-free/archival quality.  This should provide some protection for anything on the back page, though I think it would take a very long time for any damage to occur.

Work In Progress:

Back Cover - brown kraft paper and blue silk bookcloth

Pages of 300gsm Ocean Blue card; spacers of card and book board, page wraps of peacock paper.

All are cut, creased and punched, ready for assembly and binding.

The front cover, with hinge and decorative navy tussah silk panel. 

The Japanese Stab Stitch binding in progress. 

The finished stab-stitch binding in golden yellow linen.  You can see the section wraps, of peacock paper, to match the front cover.  Each section consists of two card pages, two mulberry tissue interleaves, wrapped round card spacers for strength and a book-board spacer, to allow for the extra bulk of the tags being added to the album. 

Detail of the binding and tussah silk edging. 

The back cover, with silk edging and linen stab-stitch binding.

 

Views of the inside of the album, showing the covers, the blue card pages and interleaves. 

The finished Peacock Wedding Album!

It measures 12" x 12", with a useable page area inside of 11.75" x 10".  There are 12 pages of 300gsm Canford card, with Japanese Bib-Tengu mulberry tissue interleaves.  The front cover is a peacock design paper, reproduced from a Chinese wallpaper at Erdigg, a UK National Trust property.  The section wraps are of the same peacock design paper.  The binding is a Japanese-style stab-stitch binding, with a hinged, two-part cover, over navy tussah-silk hand-lined bookcloth decorative edges.  

I contacted the customer today, to tell her the book is completed and will be on its way to her very soon. She's really excited about this - and to tell the truth, so am I!